Apartment on Craigslist was a fabulous place in a great location. Too bad it didn’t exist.

Matthew Scothorn, 48, is rehabbing the house where he and his husband live in Lincoln Square, and they needed a place to stay temporarily during construction.

So Scothorn turned to the ample online listings on Craigslist of Chicago apartment sublets being offered.

And he found what seemed like the perfect place: a furnished, 450-square-feet studio apartment with off-site parking right in the Loop. The rent: $1,400 a month.

The ad — placed by someone named “Gudelia Rivera” — didn’t ask for any money right away. Scothorn says that gave him confidence that the listing was real.

“I thought, ‘This is great,’ ” he says. “It looked really nice.”

Things got a little weird, though, once Scothorn got in touch with Rivera. He says she told him she’d moved to New York to start a new job and couldn’t show him the apartment.

Next, he heard from someone who said her name was “Lauren” and answered one of his emailed questions.

Then, he couldn’t get an answer about exactly where the promised parking spot was — only that it was “nearby.”

Still, he was sent a six-page sublease agreement with more photos of the apartment, Unit 204, including the dining area, kitchen, laundry appliances, bed and bathroom.

The agreement specified a total of $8,400 for six months of rent, plus a refundable $1,400 security deposit.

Scothorn says he wasn’t going to pay that much without more information. So his husband went to visit the building.

“The security person said, ‘That’s strange. There is no Unit 204,’ “ Scothorn says.

Confused, Scothorn checked with the building’s leasing office and was told that the second floor is part of a hotel in the building — not an apartment for rent.

“It wasn’t that hard for me to notice it was a scam,” says Seth Friedman, a property manager for the building. “Floor 2 doesn’t haven’t any apartments.”

Relieved not to be out thousands of dollars, Scothorn posted about his experience on the social media site NextDoor.com to warn people about the scam and contacted Craiglist, which took down the ad.

The Sun-Times tried to reach “Gudelia Rivera” by the email address that was listed but didn’t hear back.

Apartment rental scams are becoming commonplace, as are vacation rental scams.

Experts say scammers, in some cases based overseas, steal photos and information from real apartment listings to create fake posts, hoping to pocket the rent money before the victim realizes it’s fake.

Craigslist cautions users they should “deal locally, face-to-face — follow this one rule and avoid 99% of scam attempts. Do not rent or purchase sight-unseen — that amazing ‘deal’ may not exist.”

The federal government says to watch out for these red flags:

• The rent is unusually low for the area.
• The ad contains spelling or grammatical errors.
• The owner claims to be busy or out of town and can’t show the unit.
• The owner insists on a wire transfer to pay the rent and security deposit. That’s the equivalent of sending cash: Once it’s wired, it’s gone.
• The owner insists on getting your Social Security number before you are able to verify that the offering is legitimate.

Consumers can do a reverse-image search online to check whether photos in an online apartment listing are copies.

Doing exactly that, a Sun-Times reporter found that the “Gudelia Rivera” apartment images also had appeared in listings in San Francisco on Zillow or other sites as far back as 2014.

Scam online ads can be reported to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at IC3.gov.

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